


What is Dead May Never Die

by ExpositionFairy



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Drabble, Gen, House Greyjoy, crossover (sort of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 19:16:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpositionFairy/pseuds/ExpositionFairy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Euron Greyjoy knows the things the rest of his House has forgotten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What is Dead May Never Die

**Author's Note:**

> I _can't_ have been the only one to make these connections.

Euron Greyjoy has a reputation for being mad.  

Among a House and people of outcasts, he is outcast himself, warned never to return to the Iron Isles by command of his own brothers.  They think they know why, and certainly he won’t deny their claim—he  _did_  take his brother Victarion’s woman, just as he’s taken a great many others over the years, as if there were any difference.  The other whispers about him, his evil eye and mad blue smile, his unpredictability and vicious temper, all of those are true too.  But they’re none of them the  _real_  reason Euron Greyjoy is outcast, and when he thinks about it he laughs.

Euron Greyjoy is outcast because he _knows._

He knows what the Iron Islands have forgotten, what the Greyjoys pay pale homage to with their sigil and what the Drowned Men pay lip service to in their baptisms.   All Ironborn know the words, of course, initiation rite and battle cry and funeral litany: “ _What is dead may never die_.”  Euron Greyjoy knows where the words came from.  Were  _bastardized_  from.  He’s sailed to doomed Valyria and back again, shattered and smoking and sunken.  He’s learned the _true_ words, correct and complete, though only as accurate as human tongues could shape them.  

Throughout Westeros and Essos both there’s talk of Winter coming, of magic returning and dragons waking and the frozen dead rising to walk again.  The Gods have returned, they say, and Euron and his ship of muted and mutilated men have seen their true shape. 

 _Stranger aeons_ , he thinks to himself, as he turns the  _Silence_  toward home once more.   _Indeed._

The men and women of the Iron Islands may play at worship of their Drowned God, but Euron Greyjoy knows its  _name_.


End file.
